“Are you sure you’re going to be alright? I don’t have to go out tonight.” Ali gives her best friend a concerned look.
“Yes, you do.” Melissa gives Ali a serious stare, which is only made mildly less effective by the redness of her eyes. “I don’t expect you to babysit me every night. It was a breakup, not a bereavement!” Melissa tries a smile but, from the expression on Ali’s face, it doesn’t come off all that well.
“Don’t do that, ‘Mel. I’m the one who’s been sharing pizzas and passing you tissues for the better part of a week! You don’t have to pretend around me. I know it wasn’t just a breakup!” Ali lays her hand over Melissa’s, surreptitiously moving her coffee mug out of reach at the same time, knowing that if Melissa has any more coffee, she’ll be up half the night obsessing over what happened between her and Hawk.
Melissa looks up at the ceiling, sighing deeply and wrapping her terry cloth dressing gown around herself even tighter. She was in the second stage of post-breakup mourning now and that mostly consisted of moping around the house and feeling sorry for herself. So far so good.
“What do you want me to say, Ali? That I cared about him? That I hate how we left things?” Melissa rubs at her eyes, surprised that she can even bring herself to cry anymore. Her tears should all be used up by now, surely. “Sorry, I know you’re just trying to help. But right now I think I just need to be alone.” She lets her forehead drop down to the kitchen counter and starts banging her forehead against it.
“You know that if you keep doing that for much longer, you’ll be lucky if you have any brain cells left.” Ali nudges Melissa back from the countertop and rolls her eyes at the expression on her friend’s face. “How have you got yourself so worked up about a guy that you only just met? I mean I haven’t even met him yet!” Ali almost looks more annoyed about this than any other aspect of the situation.
“Sorry, Ali, you’re right. I should have waited until you’d given him the seal of approval before I screwed everything up.” Melissa throws herself onto the couch with more force than necessary, taking up the same position she’s held the majority of the last few days.
“Exactly.” Ali’s response shows no sign of irony whatsoever. She collapses into an armchair opposite Melissa, looking at her intently.
“What?” Melissa shifts uncomfortably under her friend’s intense stare.
“I’m just wondering when you’re going to be done beating yourself up about this.” Ali shrugs, looking around the room as if she might find the answer somewhere—just lying around.
“Ali, we’ve been through this.” Melissa groans, putting her head in her hands. She can’t bear to have this conversation again. “I lied to him; he found out in the worst possible way. He didn’t give me a chance to explain, and I don’t know if he had if it would have made any difference. I betrayed him, Ali, and this is a guy who takes trust pretty damn seriously. I screwed up. End of story.” Melissa wonders if she sounds as miserable to her friend’s ears as she does to her own.
“You were doing a job, ‘Mel. A job that you’ve jeopardized to do the right thing by Hawk and his buddies.” Ali leans forward, as if she’s trying to get her friend to see sense purely with the power of her mind. “That has to count for something.”
“Not enough apparently.” Melissa shrugs, signaling she’s done with the conversation.
“It’s not like you knew you were going to fall in love with the guy when you agreed to write the article. You couldn’t have planned for this, ‘Mel. You get that, right?” Ali looks like she wants to shake Melissa into rational thought.
“I didn’t say I’d fallen in love with him.” Melissa grumbles her response, knowing that she’s zeroed in on the only thing she can disagree with.
“No, you didn’t.” Ali gives her a meaningful look, which Melissa dodges as best she can.
The silence stretches between them, and Cat jumps up onto Melissa’s lap as if she senses that her mistress needs some comfort. “So how’d it go with Vince’s new girlfriend? We never talked about it.” Melissa’s attempt to change the direction of the conversation isn’t exactly elegant, but it gets the job done. She’s fed up with talking about herself and about Hawk and about the many ways in which she had screwed everything up.
Ali gives her a long look, as if she’s deciding whether or not to let Melissa distract her. “She was…fine.” The way that Ali says it gives the impression that the new girlfriend was anything but that mediocre word. “You know his type, all moony-eyed with less than two brain cells to rub together. This one wanted to be an actress.”
Melissa snorts at the thought, just imagining the scene between the two women. “So what’s she doing in Portland?”
“She probably couldn’t find her way to LA.” Ali’s tone is bitchy, but she knows it.
“Meow! Saucer of milk for the blonde in the armchair!” Melissa raises an eyebrow, and they both laugh. It feels good; it’s the first time that Melissa has really laughed since her argument with Hawk. She feels the smile fade from her face and remembers how there is a reason she has decided not to think about him. “Well, it’s not like you were going to actually like any of the girls that you saw with Vince.”
Ali refrains from comment, but the wistful expression on her face says it all.
“Aren’t you supposed to be going on a date? You’re going to be pretty late if you don’t leave now.” Melissa gives her friend a pointed look, but Ali doesn’t move from her chair. “Ali?”
Her glazed expression fades, and she seems to be rejuvenated with renewed purpose. “I can’t leave you like this, looking all sad and heartbroken. What sort of a best friend would I be if I dumped you for a dude?” Ali shakes her head in consternation.
“Umm, the kind that actually has a life?” Melissa looks at her friend a little more closely. “You were looking forward to this up until about an hour ago. What happened?”
Ali rolls her eyes at the serious note in Melissa’s tone. “I changed my mind, that’s all. I’m just not in the mood for the all the first date getting-to-know-you crap.”
Melissa frowns at her friend, knowing that Ali loves first dates. It has been one of the running jokes between them: Ali would go on any number of first dates, she loved the fact that she could be whomever she wanted to be, that it was a blank page, full of possibilities. It was the dates after that when she usually lost interest.
Ali bites her bottom lip, looking cagey, and Melissa zeroes in on the action like a missile. “Ali, fess up.”
Ali sighs theatrically. “It’s no big deal. He seems like a nice guy and all, but I just realized the real reason I agreed to go out with him at all.”
Melissa waits for the punch line, but Ali is silent, looking at her hands knotted in her lap. Ali is the most outgoing, extroverted, full of fun person that Melissa has ever known, but the woman sitting in front of her doesn’t look like any of those things. “Don’t make me drag it out of you, Ali.” She gives what Ali refers to as her ‘Don’t fuck with me’ stare.
“He’s a friend of Vince’s.” Ali says the words so quietly that at first Melissa doesn’t think she’s heard right. However, the embarrassment on Ali’s face makes it clear that Melissa hasn’t misinterpreted her whisper.
“You agreed to go out with him because you knew that Vince would find out and you were hoping it would bother him, make him jealous.” There’s no judgment in Melissa’s voice—if anything she’s surprised that something like this hasn’t happened before.
“I know, it’s pathetic.” Ali barks a humorless laugh.
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Melissa chides her. “But Ali, don’t you think it’s time you just told him?”
Ali looks at her as if she’s just suggested that she jump out of a twenty-story window. “Hell to the no.” She shakes her head so hard that Melissa worries she might give herself whiplash. “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing…distracting me from your train wreck of a relationship to talk about my train wreck of a non-relationship. I see your game, Potter.”
Melissa holds her hands up in surrender. “You got me. We’re equally pathetic.” She wonders if that merits a high-five, probably not. “So are you going to let this guy down easy or just stand him up?” Ali shoots her a look, and Melissa makes an innocent face. “Either is good with me, I’m just asking. This is a judgment free zone!”
“I’ll text him and say that I’m not feeling well.” Ali shrugs, as she heads to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.
“Does that mean we’re moving on to the ‘Death by Chocolate’ faze of our men troubles?” Melissa figures she could get excited about that particular part of the grieving process.
“You know it. I’ll hit the store for supplies.” Ali grabs her keys and pulls open the door brusquely to a buxom platinum blonde who looks as shocked as Ali does.
“I was just about to ring the bell.” She motions towards the doorbell, as if trying to prove that she wasn’t just hanging outside their house with no intention of coming in.
“Okaaayyy.” Ali gives her a dubious look, wondering who the hell this person is that’s turned up uninvited at their front door.
“I’m here to see Melissa.” The blonde folds her arms over her impressive rack and gives Ali a look that would have wilted a lesser woman.
Ali blinks a few times and then puts two and two together, taking in Felicia’s dye job, her eyes flicking over the intricate designs on her nails. “You must be Felicia.”
“Felicia?” Melissa squeaks the word out from the other room, scrambling to her feet and going to stand in the threshold of the living room.
Felicia takes in Melissa in her dressing gown and fuzzy pig slippers, rolling her eyes before she looks back at Ali. “So can I come in? It’s freezing out here.”
Ali steps back and Felicia takes that as enough of an invitation to walk inside, huffing about how cold it is outside.